Agriculture

While the Kingdom’s biggest industrial pig farming company is seeing steady growth as the nation’s population and hunger for pork grows, small pig farmers are having a hard time of it in the face of fluctuating prices and lower cost imports from Thailand, according to experts and insiders who came to a recent ...

The government on Friday denied it had violated a moratorium on granting new land concessions when Prime Minister Hun Sen signed off on more than 20,000 hectares of land to three rubber companies 11 days after the ban was announced on May 7. According to documents ...

Shukaku, a company owned by a CPP Senator was given a 99-year lease to to the area in 2007.  Immediately, the company started filling in the lake with sand and began kicking out thousands of families in what is one of the most notorious evictions ...

According to documents published in the latest Royal Gazette, Prime Minister Hun Sen signed off on three land concessions covering more than 20,000 hectares last month, 11 days after a moratorium on the granting of such concessions was announced. On May 7, Mr. Hun Sen signed ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen made a bold pledge to the hundreds of thousands of Cambodian villagers fighting companies for their homes yesterday, ordering that in every economic land concession across the country, space must be provided for those they would displace. But last month’s royal book ...

Revenues generated from rubber exports dropped 25 percent to $41 million in the first four months of the year compared to the same period in 2011, as rubber prices on the international market plummeted, according to data released yesterday by the Ministry of Commerce. While rubber ...

A biofuel company is currently under investigation for fraud in the U.K. after millions of dollars of investors’ money was spent on a jatropha plantation in Banteay Meanchey province that never produced even a single drop of biodiesel. The company, London-based Sustainable Agro Energy PLC, had ...

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen on Thursday gave authorities six months to end a spate of land disputes pitting developers against villagers that have sparked increasingly violent protests. Hun Sen ordered officials to visit contested areas and issue deeds to families facing illegal evictions, a move ...

The case of the 13 imprisoned Boeung Kak women is in the hands of the Appeal Court now, the women’s defence lawyer said yesterday. Lawyer Harm Sunrith said that Phnom Penh Municipal Court had sent the case to the Appeal Court on Tuesday, adding that he ...

Large quantities of cheap green bean exports from Thailand are driving down prices of the product in Kompong Cham province by as much as 40 percent compared to the same period last year and forcing farmers to grow other crops, officials and farmers said yesterday. The ...

Seventeen villagers from Banteay Meanchey province’s O’Chrou district filed a complaint yesterday with the rights group Adhoc after their homes were allegedly unlawfully bulldozed in June last year. ...

The Koh Kong Provincial Court summonsed 23 villagers from Chikor Leu commune to present themselves – and any relevant documents – at a July 12 hearing with representatives of the two sugar companies that bulldozed their farmland and evicted them from their homes in 2006. ...

Sixteen ethnic minority families in Ratanakkiri province have claimed that they are being forced from their land after a commune chief signed it away, and that commune borders have been redrawn to dispossess them. On Friday, the families, who have been living on 30 hectares of ...

One and a half million children still toil as laborers in Cambodia’s fisheries, brick factories, agricultural plantations and construction sites, government officials said yesterday at an event held at Phnom Penh’s Wat Botum ahead of World Day Against Child Labor on Tuesday. The government has set ...

After years of poor yields, the cricket farmers of Kompong Thom province have more than tripled their average catch compared with the same time last year due to early rains, an agriculture official said yesterday. Ou Bunsophoan, director of the Kompong Thom provincial agriculture department, said ...

Phnom Penh Autonomous Port plans to buy a rice-polishing machine from China, and will also look to build a rice storage facility in Kandal province. These moves, officials said, were intended to push along Cambodia’s rice trade during a period of uncertainty for the industry. Facilities ...

Land issues will continue to be a serious problem for Cambodia’s government, given the high number of continued crackdowns, arrests and violence, analysts say. “If an issue is covered and unsolved, one day it will explode,” Lao Monghay, an independent political analyst, told “Hello VOA,” in ...

The Kratie Provincial Court has released on bail five of the eight people charged after a military-style operation by security forces on a small village alleged to be the home of a secessionist movement, a court official said yesterday. On May 16, a 14-year-old girl was ...

A 144-tonne shipment of Cambodian fragrant rice will leave Phnom Penh for Fuzhou, China on Saturday, the first Chinese order for the Kingdom’s milled rice after a recent government agreement was reached on Chinese regulation. Mekong Oryza Trading received the order months earlier ...

A factory supplying shoes for German sports brand Puma has experienced no mass faintings and seen overall productivity improve since it started providing meals to its workers last year, a Puma representative and a factory official said yesterday. Workers at Huey Chuen (Cambodia) Corp. Ltd. in ...

Heavy rainfall in April and May has cut salt production by a third in Kep and Kampot provinces even though farmers extended the harvest season there by a month, farmers said yesterday. Last year, farmers were able to produce about 90,000 tons of salt on 4,500 ...

Climate change was named as the reason for Cambodian salt production this year declining about 15 per cent, experts said yesterday. ...

While preliminary results from Sunday’s commune elections indicate that the SRP took a thumping in urban centers—the SRP lost all three of their commune chief positions in Phnom Penh—the party appears to have made gains in rural areas locked in land disputes. Though the figures are ...

Cambodia’s inflation rose by 5.49 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter of the year, due to increases in food and fuel prices, according to the monthly data from the National Institute of Statistics compiled by the Post. However, economists and government officials said they were ...